Friday, December 10, 2010

For a change, this Christian Science Monitor piece by Becky Katz does not try to idealise the status of Jews in Iran - described, along with Christians, as a 'struggling minority'. But such is the regime's paranoia that the police checks every week on the supposed existence of 'converts to Judaism'.

As Jews around the world celebrate Hanukkah this week, menorahs are burning in a surprising corner of the world: Iran.

Home to Jews – including the biblical Esther – for 3,000 years, the land today is sprinkled with synagogues that serve the Middle East’s largest community of Jews after Israel.

At recent services in the Joybar synagogue in Tehran, one of 20 in the capital city, Iranian Jews streamed in until the hall, decorated with gold, wooden, and velvet relics. More than 200 attendees read from prayer books printed in both Hebrew and Farsi.

Inside, the men wear the kippa, a Jewish religious head covering. The women cover their hair with their hijab, adhering to the Orthodox Jewish custom of covering their hair while also abiding by the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“It is safe for us in Iran, for Jews. But we always have to be careful. We know that we should stay with our community. We should not become close to Muslims. If we do, it will only be trouble,” says Rachel, a young woman who attended services recently with her toddler son.

There is official acceptance of the Jewish presence in Iran – Jews, along with Christians and Zoroastrians, are allowed a representative in parliament and provided with special family law courts. But as Israel heightens its rhetoric against Iran – WikiLeaks cables this week revealed an Israeli plan for regime change and support for a military strike this year – Iranian Jews find themselves in a tight spot.

Siamak Marreh-Sedq, the sole Jewish representative to the Iranian parliament, argued recently that Israel would never attack Iran.

“No idiot may imagine attacking Iran because the Iranian nation has already proved that it obeys the words and order of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution,” proclaimed Mr. Marreh-Sedq on Aug. 2, according to the Fars News Agency, indicating that as a Jewish Iranian MP, he stood behind Iran and not Israel.

Iran’s Jews, such as Marreh-Sedq, have sometimes been criticized for siding too closely with the Islamic Republic to avoid possible government retaliation because of the stand-off between arch-enemies Iran and Israel. The tensions illustrate a decades-long struggle to distinguish Judaism from support for Israel’s Zionist policies.

At the beginning of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the regime severed diplomatic relations with Israel and ushered in a new Constitution that marginalizes minorities.

Early in the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared that Jews would be distinguished from Zionists. But in 1979, the head of Tehran’s Jewish community, millionaire businessman Habibollah Elghanian, was executed after being convicted by a revolutionary court for spying for Israel – a sign to many that Jews could be targeted no matter how wealthy or prominent they might be.

In a closed trial in 2000, an appeals court upheld the imprisonment of 10 of 13 Iranian Jews, including a minor, arrested the year before on charges of spying for Israel and the US. They were released before finishing their prison terms, due to international pressure.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his government consistently refuse to refer to Israel by name, opting instead for “Zionist entity” or Palestine. He has called the Holocaust a “myth” whose scope has been greatly exaggerated to serve as an excuse for the establishment of Israel and support of its policies.

“The pretext for the creation of the Zionist regime is false,” said Mr. Ahmadinejad on Al Quds (Jerusalem) Day last year, an event designed to highlight Muslim solidarity with Palestinians. “It is a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim. Confronting the Zionist regime is a national and religious duty.”

Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, often described as Ahmadinejad’s spiritual mentor, is believed to have helped inspire the president’s doubt about the scale of the Holocaust. In December 2006, Iranian authorities coordinated an international conference that featured many Holocaust deniers.

An Iranian-funded website recently published a cartoon slide show of Jews fabricating the Holocaust to justify the state of Israel, depicting Jews as worms, fat men with long noses, and butchers of Palestinians.

But Jews, whose population in Iran has dropped to 25,000 from 100,000 in the 1950s, aren’t the only struggling minority in Iran.

The US State Department estimates that 300,000 Christians live in Iran, with more than 70 registered churches and countless informal groups run from individuals’ homes. As many as 100,000 Christians in Iran are converts, according to local estimates.

“Theoretically in Islamic jurisprudence, death is the punishment for any Muslim who dares to convert,” says a Muslim journalist jailed during former President Mohammed Khatami’s 1997-2005 tenure for writing about the conversion of Muslims. “In practice in Iran, converts are arrested for a few months and then released, which helps their case in seeking asylum abroad.”

But state-run businesses refuse to hire Christian and Jewish converts, and those who practice minority religions are arrested if they proselytize, he says.

“The secret police come every week to the Jewish Association and ask if any Muslims have tried to convert to Judaism,” whispers Rachel, who asked to go by a pseudonym. “They will kill us if that happens. But more people are trying to convert to Judaism, a few come every week ... and ask. We always tell them to go away.”

1 comment:

The New York Times has a report on Nazi war criminals including info on the Nazi collaborator, pro-Holocaust mufti of Jerusalem and how some US officials viewed him.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us/12holocaust.html

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)